eugene cho

This gets my early vote for art image of the year.  And if I can be honest, I get a little more satisfaction and pride that this art comes courtesy of a Korean-American artist [graphic designer] named Ji Lee from NYC.  Lots of emerging Korean-American artists but they get no love.

What do you think of the dead bull? 

I can’t stop staring at it.  It’s as provocative and subversive as this art referred to as “Upside Down Church” but named “Device to Root out Evil” by the artist:

From the Portfolio Magazine:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance. [read the full article]

“Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal.  Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.  Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be. Matthew 6:19-21 [NLT]

Filed under: politics, religion, financial crisis, ji lee, wall street